


Suddenly There's Sunlight

by insignificant457



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 13:08:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29933889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/insignificant457/pseuds/insignificant457
Summary: “I was beginning to forget what your scowl looked like, so I decided to come see it for myself.”Words and gifts exchanged before Inej leaves Ketterdam.
Relationships: Kaz Brekker/Inej Ghafa
Comments: 10
Kudos: 67





	Suddenly There's Sunlight

**Author's Note:**

> I felt the need to write something slightly more lighthearted for Kaz and Inej after the emotional turmoil of their chapter in By the End of the Day. So please enjoy the fluffiest thing I've written (given my track record, I know that's not saying a lot, but still).
> 
> Title is from the song "All I've Ever Known" from Hadestown, a Kanej song if ever I've heard one.

The first time she uses the phrase “I can help you,” it is the day they first meet in the Menagerie. It is said in a moment of desperation, but it pays off, and the next day, it seems that it is him that is helping her, rather than the other way around. And because he rescued her from the hell she had been living in, she is willing to do almost anything for him.

In the early days, she keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for him to ask her--to force her--to repay him for taking her away from the Menagerie with the kind of “favors” she had been forced to give the men at the Menagerie who paid Tante Heleen for the pleasure. She is certain that if she doesn’t perform well as a spy, he will ask her to perform in other ways. He never does. Eventually, she finds she can finally breathe without wondering when he will ask that of her. Years later, when she knows him better, when she has seen him break into a cold sweat at the touch of her hand, she will find it laughable, the anxiety she had over it.

Still, she makes herself useful in any way that she can. She is determined to give him a good return on his investment, and so she makes herself helpful. She cannot say if she says the phrase verbatim again in all the time she works for him in the Dregs, but it is there in every job she volunteers for, in every order she follows, in every time she covers for him with Per Haskell. It is there in every cup of healthful tea she makes him drink and every meal she brings him in his office when he is so busy he forgets to eat. _I can help you,_ she shows him with every offer of prayer and every time she believes in his innate goodness, even when he makes it hard. 

The next time the phrase passes between them, he is repeating it back to her in a bathroom while she bleeds through her bandages and he sweats through his suit. And he does help her, even though his bandaging is imperfect and he nearly has a panic attack every time he touches her skin. He gives her hope that she isn’t crazy for wanting this, that there might actually be a chance of...something. 

While Inej’s gestures of help have often been in the smaller, mundane ways, or in ways he simply refuses to acknowledge, Kaz’s offers of help are fewer and far between, but they are usually grand and life-changing. Taking her from the Menagerie, paying off her contract, buying her a ship. Finding her parents. These moments almost make her forget all the times he was horrible and indifferent in between them. Almost. 

But somehow, over the course of their complicated relationship, the phrase “I can help you” has become a mantra and an inside joke and a promise all rolled into one. The words pass between the two of them twice more before she leaves Ketterdam.

She says them first, one week after her parents arrival in Ketterdam. It has been an incredibly strange and emotional week, what with having her two worlds collide so completely. Having to explain to her parents what had become of her after she was taken had torn her apart inside. Kaz had offered to be there for her the whole time, and she had gratefully accepted it, terrified of the way her parents would look at her once they knew the whole story. Having him there felt like a lifeline. He had sat next to her on the couch in Wylan’s sitting room and held her hand, no gloves, the whole time, only letting go so her father and mother could sweep her into a tearful hug once she’d finished telling the whole sordid tale. It is the kindest thing she has ever known him to do. 

Now, she sits in his new office, absently playing with one of the ships in a bottle that Per Haskell had left behind. It is the middle of the night, and she has snuck away from the Van Eck mansion and found herself here. Kaz is, predictably, still awake, despite the ridiculous hour. When she’d walked in, he’d looked up from the books he was going over, gestured to the chair in front of the desk, and returned to his work. It feels good to sit here in companionable silence with him, just like before. She is excited to be free of her indenture, to actually make a difference fighting slavers, once she learns how to sail and puts together a crew, which Specht says will take at least a month until she is capable of setting off on a voyage across the True Sea to return her parents to their caravan, but she knows that she will miss moments like this. 

They spend several minutes like this, and then Kaz says, without looking up, “What brings you here in the middle of the night?”

Inej doesn’t really know. All she knows is that she feels like she is suffocating under all of her parents’ well-meaning but pitying looks, and that their constant presence and unending stream of questions about where she is going and what she is doing and when she will be back is beginning to grate on her nerves. She is happy they are here, and most of the time she is so grateful to see them and be around them that she doesn’t mind, but tonight she just needed to get away. She had set out across the rooftops with no particular destination in mind, but, as always, her feet brought her here. But she doesn’t know how to say all of this to Kaz. He’ll apologize for bringing them here, and she doesn’t want that. So she decides to risk a joke instead. “I was beginning to forget what your scowl looked like, so I decided to come see it for myself.”

He does not laugh, nor does he look up. “If you’ve forgotten this quickly, you may forget me entirely once you’re out on the high seas, fighting slavers.” His tone is similar to hers, but she senses a current of fear underneath it. Like maybe she actually will forget about him.

She reaches over and gently touches his sleeve before pulling her hand back, knowing how much he needs his personal space. “I could never forget you, Kaz.”

He shrugs off the declaration, turning a page in his ledger with rather more force than is necessary. “We’re going to be short-staffed around here without you. I already feel like I know half as much about the goings-on of this city as I did a month ago.”

“You should find a new spider,” she responds evenly. The workings of the gang feel much more safe than talking about her feelings for Kaz and the mark he’s left on her, so she welcomes the topical shift. “Roeder is good.”

“Not as good as you. He’s agile and he can get into places I need him to break into, but he’s got a shoddy memory. His reports are all vague, and half the time the information is incorrect.”

“Then maybe you need two people to do my job. Roeder can do the acrobatics, and another person to gather information.”

“There’s no one in the Dregs who can do that.”

“Maybe you haven’t looked hard enough. I can help you.” He finally looks up from his work. An unspoken acknowledgement of the meaning behind those words settles between them. “I can help train my replacement,” she tells him earnestly. 

“Aren’t you busy learning how to sail and hunt down slavers? You don’t have time to train a new recruit. You aren’t beholden to the Dregs anymore, Inej. You don’t need to help me.”

“No, I don’t need to,” she agrees. “But I want to. I’ll still be around for another month. I can make time to train a new spider so you won’t be so bereft when I leave. I have to make sure someone’s here to cover your ass and steal your secrets while I’m gone.”

“No one will be able to steal my secrets as well as you, Wraith,” he says, and something about it feels like dangerous territory, like an admission. “But it’s better than nothing. Who have you got in mind?”

Inej smiles, and they spend the next few hours going back and forth with the pros and cons of various members of the Dregs. As the night comes to an end, Inej knows that this is the thing she will miss most about Ketterdam when she leaves. 

Six weeks later, Kaz comes to see Inej off for her first true voyage on _The Wraith_. The night before, he had been persuaded to come to Wylan’s for a send-off dinner, and after everyone had gone to bed, the two of them sat on the back patio and talked until the early hours of the morning, when she had yawned one too many times, and he had taken his leave, claiming he’d left his work with the Dregs unattended for far too long. They had both stood up, lingered, and then he bid her a stiff goodnight and set off across the city. If it had been anyone else, she may have been worried about him making the trek back to the Slat so late, but thinking Kaz unsafe on the streets of Ketterdam was like thinking herself unsafe up on a high wire. There was no fall they could not recover from. 

After their talk the night before, she is not sure whether he is going to come to see her off. As she loads up the ship, Wylan and Jesper, and even Anika and Pim and a few other Dregs come to bid her safe travels, but Kaz is notably absent. However, as she emerges from the cabin below after loading up the last of her parents’ luggage, she sees her father on the dock in conversation with a familiar figure in funereal black, leaning on a cane. Her heart gives a newly familiar tug at the sight of him, and she feels the coil of anxiety she didn’t realize she was feeling unwind. 

Rather than taking the gangplank down to meet him, she simply jumps off the side of the ship, landing with the acrobatic grace she has always prided herself on. As she approaches, her father abruptly falls silent, and the two of them turn to look at her. “We’re just about ready to set sail, Papa,” she says brightly, covering up the feeling of anxiety that the sight of her two worlds colliding still brings. She looks at her father expectantly, hoping he will get the hint and give her a moment alone with Kaz. There are still so many things she wants to say to him before she sets sail, but she cannot imagine trying to say them in front of her father.

Her father picks up on her tone, and gives a nod. He turns to Kaz, and shakes his hand in the customary Suli way of showing gratitude--both hands wrapped around Kaz’s, punctuated with a short bow. “Thank you, Mr. Brekker, for taking care of my daughter when I could not,” he says solemnly, not letting go of Kaz’s hand. “It is a debt I can never repay you.”

“No repayment necessary, Mr. Ghafa,” Kaz responds in a tone she’s not sure she’s ever heard from him before. Sincerity. It’s a new look for him. “And I can assure you she took care of herself far more than I took care of her.” 

Inej’s father smiles. “I have no doubt,” he says, then lets go of Kaz’s hand and heads toward the ship. Inej watches him go before turning back to Kaz. 

“What was he saying to you before I showed up?”

Kaz smirks a little, shifting his cane. Inej notices and sits down on one of the large sandbags lining the dock. She pats the spot next to her, and he sits down roughly, obviously eager to get his weight off of his bad leg, which has been worse than ever since his Dregs coup all those weeks ago. “I believe he was trying to threaten me into treating you well. It was hard to tell, since he kept peppering in his thanks for saving you from the Menagerie. I kept telling him he didn’t need to thank me, but he wouldn’t listen.”

“He’s right to thank you,” Inej says sincerely, “I want to thank you, too. Really,” she says as he rolls his eyes. “You may not have understood exactly what you were doing for me that night you bought my indenture, but you need to know it was the single most heroic thing anyone has ever done for me.”

“I’m not a hero, Inej.”

“You are to me.” This isn’t how she planned this conversation to go, but she knows she needs to say it now, before she goes off on the most dangerous mission of her life. “You saved my life that night, and in that action you have saved my life every night and every day since then. I’m not sure I’ve ever properly thanked you for it, so I need to tell you. Thank you. From the bottom of my heart.”

“You’ve saved my ass plenty of times since then. We don’t keep score, Inej, you know that. Your thanks are unnecessary.”

“Just because they are unnecessary does not mean they are unwarranted. You showed me I was dangerous when all I felt was helpless. Seeing that in myself has saved me countless times, and you deserve at least some of the credit for it.”

She can see that he is about to brush off her heartfelt words yet again, so she brushes off his brushing off and moves on to what she really came here to do. “I have a present for you.” 

He raises an eyebrow nearly to his hairline as she pulls out a small box tied up with a twine bow. His nimble thief’s fingers undo the bow in a heartbeat, and as he opens the lid, his other eyebrow joins the first. 

“They’re fingerless gloves,” Inej says with a note of teasing in her voice. “I thought they might help you get used to life without the gloves without having to go all the way. A safety net, of sorts.” 

He lets out a very un-Kaz-Brekker-like snort, and peels off one of his usual black leather gloves, replacing it with one of the new ones. “They’re brown,” he says, stretching his fingers against the pull of the leather. As he curls his hand into a fist, his bare fingertips disappear into the leather, vulnerability concealed, ready for violence. It fits him in more ways than one. “They’ll clash with my suits.”

“Then maybe you’ll just need to expand your wardrobe. You look like you’re going to a funeral, by the way. Not very comforting for someone who’s about to set sail on her first voyage as captain.” 

He opens his mouth to say something, but apparently thinks better of it. Instead, he raises his hand to tuck a strand of hair that has come loose from her braid behind her ear. His bare fingers brush lightly against the shell of her ear, and she can feel him tense. He takes a deep breath, as if to steady himself, and then lets his fingers trail lightly along her jaw. Inej can feel the heat rushing into her cheeks, and she hopes that everyone, including her parents, is too busy getting everything ready for the voyage to notice her flushing at the feel of a boy’s fingertips on her face. 

He pulls away after a moment, and says, “I have something for you, too.” He pulls an envelope out of his jacket pocket and hands it to her. 

When she opens it, she finds pages of a ledger, listing out a handful of transactions along with dates, locations, names. Something sinks in Inej’s stomach, which is ridiculous. What was she expecting, a love letter? Of course it’s business, although she doesn’t know what this business has to do with her. She’s about to be out of the country for who knows how long. 

“What is this?”

“It’s from Tante Heleen’s ledger of the Menagerie. Where and when she acquired her working girls. Not all of them though. The ones who work for her of their own free will aren’t on that list.”

The implications hit Inej like a punch to the gut. “This is a record of her purchases of slaves?”

“It looks that way. I thought it might give you an idea where to start looking.”

“It does. Thank you, Kaz.”

He is silent for a minute, and then he says the words. “I can help you.” They zing through her like a lightning strike. “I can dig up information like this, and pass it along to you, like you mentioned before.”

“It won’t ruin your reputation as a big, bad Barrel Boss?”

He shrugs, and the action is so boyish and so unlike the Kaz she knows that she almost laughs. He’s changed his mind about helping her. It warms her down to her toes, even with the stiff breeze off the harbor. 

Then she hears a call from the deck of _The Wraith_. Specht. They’re ready to set sail. Kaz hears it, too. He hauls himself to his feet, and Inej follows. 

“Thank you for this,” she says again, folding up the envelope and securing it safely in her inner jacket pocket. “It’ll help a lot.” 

He nods, and looks toward the horizon. Normally, this part of the goodbye is where he would leave without fanfare, but he lingers, perhaps as reluctant to part ways as she is. 

“I’ll write you when we land in Ravka,"she says, "I have to return my parents to their caravan first anyway.”

He nods again, and shoves his free hand into his pocket, the other gripping his cane. 

They stand in awkward silence for a moment more, before they both try to break it at the same time. 

“I’ll write if I find out anyth--”

“Can I hug you?”

Her request is so out of the blue that it cuts him off mid-word. He stutters to a stop, and Inej quickly realizes she may have crossed a line he is not ready to cross yet, so she tries to backpedal. 

“I’m sorry, you don’t have to, I--”

“Okay,” he says, and now it’s Inej’s turn to be shocked into silence.

“Okay?” she asks, just to clarify. He nods, and awkwardly holds out his arms. Inej leans forward slowly, as if approaching a wounded animal. She wraps her arms lightly around his waist, and rests her head against his jacket. He brings his arms haltingly around her shoulders, and they stand like that for a few seconds. Inej breathes in the scent of him, takes a moment to etch this feeling into her memory, then pulls back.

Her ship and the sea and her desire for justice are calling her, and although it hurts more than she could imagine to leave him behind, she knows it is not forever. The lingering feeling of his arms around her and his fingers against her cheek makes her want to stay, but she knows he will still be here in this city when she returns. Which she will. 

The knowledge of what will be waiting for her when she gets back propels her toward the future, so as she backs away from him she says, just loud enough for him to hear, “No mourners.”

A smile touches the corner of his lips. “No funerals.”

Later, as she stands on the deck of her ship with nothing but open sea around her, she reaches her hand into the pocket of her jacket, and is surprised to find a folded up piece of paper there. Mystified, she pulls it out. 

When she unfolds it, she can’t help but laugh. Because there, bracketed between the word “Wanted” written over and over in several languages and a reward for a staggering one hundred thousand kruge, is an impressive artist's rendition of Kaz’s face, his eyes hard and his mouth drawn into the scowl she knows so well. And there at the top, in familiar, spidery handwriting, are the words _So you don’t forget_.

**Author's Note:**

> Kaz and Inej can give each other stupid, non-life-altering gifts, as a treat.


End file.
